Tag: Ptsd

For the past three years, members of Veterans For Peace and their allies have gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Lower Manhattan on the date of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to mark another year of a war and call for peace. This year, they were finally able to do so without facing a small army of police threatening arrest.

There is little evidence that the billions of dollars spent each year to treat military service members and veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder are having their intended effects, a new report commissioned by Congress finds.

Amid the barrage of coverage of Specialist Ivan Lopez’s shooting spree at Fort Hood, evidence that has been in plain sight for years of how the violence of America’s distant wars comes back to haunt the “homeland” was missing. In that context, Lopez’s killings are one more marker on a bloody trail of death that leads from Iraq and Afghanistan into the American heartland.

The Fort Hood shooter who left three victims dead Wednesday had been being assessed for post-traumatic stress disorder. He had served for four months at the tail end of the Iraq War in 2011 and suffered from anxiety and depression.

Brandon Bryant flew predator drones from 2007 to 2011, manning the camera on UAVs that attacked people overseas. His squadron was credited with 1,626 kills; he figures he’s personally killed 13 people, and his involvement has left him traumatized.

It didn’t take much. No battles. No dead bodies. I spent just three and a half weeks as a contractor in Iraq, when the war there was at its height, rarely leaving the security of American military bases.

Almost half of the 2.2 million troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan report problems on returning home, but the attention and care many receive from the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs are not enough, a report published Tuesday finds.

Researchers report that drone pilots experience mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft deployed in the Middle East.

Karl Marlantes, a highly decorated veteran of the Vietnam War and author of two grim and heart-wrenching books based on his experiences, talks with Bill Moyers about returning home to the United States after being sent across the world to kill.

On Friday, the U.S. military took a significant step in the case of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the American soldier accused of killing 17 civilians in Afghanistan on March 11, by formally charging him with 17 counts of murder, along with other alleged crimes.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: We hear from two people living in northern Uganda, including one of Joseph Kony’s former abductees, about the viral #Kony2012 campaign. Also: Psychologist Francine Shapiro.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: We hear from two people living in northern Uganda, including one of Joseph Kony’s former abductees, about the viral #Kony2012 campaign. Also: Psychologist Francine Shapiro.

Friends tell the Los Angeles Times that Itzcoatl “Izzy” Ocampo returned from Iraq a changed man. The ex-Marine from Orange County, Calif., is accused of killing four homeless men, each stabbed more than 40 times. “He’s a veteran who did not get the help he needed,” said a fellow Marine, adding that she had trusted Ocampo with her life.

The New York Times ran a story Wednesday, the day before U.S. and Iraqi leaders marked the official end of the Iraq War, about a shocking find in an Iraqi junkyard: secret interviews from U.S. soldiers talking about the 2005 massacre of civilians in Haditha. But this kind of account, as The Washington Spectator’s Hamilton Fish noted Thursday, has been passed over by the mainstream press for years.

More and more American women face the trauma of combat, yet post-traumatic stress disorder is often presented as a uniquely male condition. According to this short documentary, the number of women suffering from PTSD symptoms has doubled in the past 10 years.

A serious conversation is under way in the United States on the subject of psychiatric drugs. The debate consists of three fundamental issues: first, whether antidepressants actually treat depression; second, the vast, growing body of evidence that psychotropic medications ... (more)

The 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for two months were pulled out of their predicament one by one Wednesday, and hopefully their ordeal is truly over, but Chilean officials are giving them the option of leaning on expert help if adjusting to life above ground proves difficult.

According to Yale historian David Blight, Memorial Day got its start at the end of the Civil War. 145 years after the end of our Civil War, our nation is engaged in near civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which we had a part in starting and no plans for ending.

Police have charged an American soldier with assaulting his young daughter. Specifically, Joshua Tabor of Tacoma, Wash., is reported to have waterboarded his 4-year-old three or four times because she was afraid of water and had trouble with her ABCs.

By escalating an unnecessary conflict, President Barack Obama runs the risk of damaging many more Americans through PTSD and other human consequences of warfare. We are heaping upon members of the military more responsibility, more work, more war, more physical and psychological trauma.

Unemployment reaches 10.2 percent—do we need a bigger stimulus? What do the GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey mean for both parties? Will the House’s historic health care bill pass, and, if so, why wait till 2013 to implement it?

It can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread—for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators. So it seems reasonable to ask whether perhaps there is something about military culture or training or experience that can be identified as causative, and then, perhaps, changed.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said it, and judging by this three-part series from CNN, the age of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is upon us. It’s warfare by joystick—and the Predator drone is only the beginning.

He was one of three U.S. soldiers implicated in the execution-style shooting of four Iraqi prisoners near Baghdad in March 2007, but 40-year-old Army Master Sgt. John E. Hatley was also believed to have been the main instigator in the incident. On Thursday, Hatley was sentenced to life in prison for murder.

Sgt. Michael Leahy Jr. was convicted of murder Friday for his part in the shooting deaths of four Iraqis in 2007. The 28-year-old Army medic, one of a group of soldiers to face charges in the case, admitted that he shot one of the victims in the back of the head, but Leahy’s lawyer argued that combat stress had destroyed his client’s capacity to reason properly.

The recent spate of war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan has proved to be a hard sell with American audiences—even more so with the U.S. military. Now, the Pentagon is combating a certain lack of nuance, as military officials see it, in flicks like “Redacted” and “In the Valley of Elah” by offering script consultation services to Hollywood types looking to make movies about the current conflicts in the Middle East.

George Ball remembers last July 4 all too well. “I spent it in my room with the windows drawn and the covers over my head,” the 32-year-old Iraq war veteran says. The bottle rockets, with their shrieking whistles followed by the pop of explosions, affected him most.

As a former United States Marine Corps sergeant who was shot and paralyzed from my mid-chest down during my second tour of duty in Vietnam on Jan. 20, 1968, I am sending my complete support and admiration to all those now involved in the courageous struggle to stop military recruitment in Berkeley and across the country.

On Thursday, a group of U.S. soldiers spoke before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war and the immeasurable toll it has taken on Iraqis and American troops. Afterward, Sgt. Matthis Chiroux announced that he is refusing to serve in Iraq.

When young American men and women sign up to serve in our military, the government makes them a basic promise: If they are wounded in the line of duty, they will get the care they need. But for far too many, that’s a promise that only exists on paper—even months after the news emerged about American vets’ shameful treatment at U.S. military facilities.

The number of active-duty soldiers who kill themselves or attempt to is the highest it’s been since the Army began keeping records almost 30 years ago. Three hundred fifty soldiers attempted suicide or injured themselves in 2002, compared with 2,100 in 2007.

Of the 750,000 or so veterans who have been discharged from the “war on terror,” roughly one-quarter have been recognized by the VA as mentally or physically injured. One of the leading debilitating injuries suffered by those men and women is PTSD, but how much they’re compensated by the government depends a great deal on where they live, according to an investigation by McClatchy’s Washington bureau.

With the problem of post-traumatic stress disorder on the rise among American veterans returning from battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, two veterans’ groups have filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (pictured) and other defendants, citing systemwide failures in dealing with the PTSD crisis on the governmental level.